← All work Case study · Direct mail · United States

Three years as the tech team for a US direct-mail company.

Open Letter Marketing prints and mails campaigns for thousands of US businesses. From 2022 to 2025 we rebuilt their website and online ordering, then automated the work of their prepress and mailing teams.

ClientOpen Letter Marketing, Inc.
IndustryDirect mail & print
What we builtWebsite, e-commerce, proofing portal, mailer system
Relationship2022 → 2025 · retained tech lead
5 s → <1 s
Page load after moving the site to Next.js
10 s → <3 s
Time to complete an online order
~40% less
Prepress workload once proof approvals were self-service
~30% faster
Mail-batch processing with automated PDF parsing

Figures as recorded during the engagement, 2022–2025.

openlettermarketing.com
Open Letter Marketing website

The site today, on the Next.js front end we built. Open Letter Marketing has continued to develop it since our engagement ended in 2025.

Portal and mailer-system screenshots on request

Internal tools

The situation

Open Letter Marketing sells direct mail online: postcards, letters, and handwritten-style mail, ordered through their website and produced in-house. The business was growing faster than its software. The site was slow, ordering was clunky, and a lot of the production work — proof approvals, mail-batch handling, USPS tracking — ran on email and manual data entry.

They didn’t want an agency project with a handover at the end. They wanted a tech lead who would own the whole stack over time, so Jitesh worked with them for three years as their outsourced tech head.

What we built
  1. Website rebuild — the marketing site moved to Next.js with static generation, hosted on Vercel. Page load dropped from about 5 seconds to under 1, which also lifted search rankings.
  2. Online ordering — custom WordPress and WooCommerce plugins connected the new front end to the shop, with tiered pricing and a much shorter order flow: from about 10 seconds to under 3 per order.
  3. Proofing portal — proof approvals moved from email threads to a self-service portal with customer comments and automatic 24-hour reminders. The prepress team’s workload fell by roughly 40%.
  4. Mailer management — a system for mail batches that parses PDFs to extract mailer IDs automatically, builds batches from metadata, and pulls live USPS updates through AccuTrace. Processing time fell by about 30%.
  5. CRM and analytics — HubSpot wired in for marketing automation and lead tracking, Google Analytics for behaviour on the site.
Next.jsVercelAWS LambdaDynamoDBLightsailCloudWatchWordPress / PHPWooCommerceHubSpotAccuTrace
What it changed

Customers order faster on a site that loads instantly. Proofs get approved without anyone chasing. Mail batches are built from the files themselves instead of being keyed in by hand. The production team spends its time on production.

For a small business, that’s the point of good software and automation: not a new dashboard, but a shorter to-do list for the people who run the place.

“I had the pleasure of working with Jitesh for 3 years. In that time, he rebuilt our entire front-end and back-end and delivered critical improvements and automations for our production processes. Jitesh takes the time to ask the right questions up front, which saves time and headaches later. His dedication and attention to detail made a big impact on our team!”Kayla Bragg-Whittaker, COO, Open Letter Marketing · LinkedIn recommendation

openlettermarketing.com ↗

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